The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people
#17051
Blay Whitby
#17062
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Dr Blay Whitby is a philosopher and technology ethicist, specialising in computer science, artificial intelligence and robotics. He is based at the University of Sussex, England. Blay Whitby graduated with first class honours from New College, Oxford University in 1974 and completed his PhD on "The Social Implications of Artificial Intelligence" at Middlesex University in 2003. His publications are predominantly in the area of the philosophy and ethical implications of artificial intelligence. His views place particular stress on the moral responsibilities of scientific and technical professionals, having some features in common with techno-progressivism.
Go to Profile#17052
David Cook
#17063
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
David "Zeb" Cook is an American game designer, best known for his work at TSR, Inc., where he was employed for over fifteen years. Cook designed several games, wrote the Expert Set for Dungeons & Dragons, worked as lead designer of the second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and invented the Planescape setting for AD&D. He is a member of the Origins Hall of Fame.
Go to Profile#17053
Nadia Comăneci
#17064
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Nadia Elena Comăneci Conner is a Romanian retired gymnast and a five-time Olympic gold medalist, all in individual events. In 1976, at the age of 14, Comăneci was the first gymnast to be awarded a perfect score of 10.0 at the Olympic Games. At the same Games she received six more perfect 10s for events en route to winning three gold medals. At the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, Comăneci won two more gold medals and achieved two more perfect 10s. During her career Comăneci won nine Olympic medals and four World Artistic Gymnastics Championship medals.
Go to Profile#17054
Stevo Todorčević
#17065
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Stevo Todorčević , is a Yugoslavian mathematician specializing in mathematical logic and set theory. He holds a Canada Research Chair in mathematics at the University of Toronto, and a director of research position at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris.
Go to Profile#17055
Johanna Narten
#17066
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Johanna Narten , was a German Indo-Europeanist and Indo-Iranian linguist who discovered the reconstructed morphological category in Proto-Indo-European now known as the Narten present. She was Professor of Indo-European and Indo-Iranian Linguistics at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and a member of the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Go to Profile#17056
Micha Perles
#17067
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Micha Asher Perles is an Israeli mathematician working in geometry, a professor emeritus at the Hebrew University. He earned his Ph.D. in 1964 from the Hebrew University, under the supervision of Branko Grünbaum. His contributions include:The Perles configuration, a set of nine points in the Euclidean plane whose collinearities can be realized only by using irrational numbers as coordinates. Perles used this configuration to prove the existence of irrational polytopes in higher dimensions.The Perles–Sauer–Shelah lemma, a result in extremal set theory whose proof was credited to Perles by Sahar...
Go to Profile#17057
Humphrey Tonkin
#17068
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Humphrey R. Tonkin is professor of English, and served as the 4th president of the University of Hartford. He is also a dedicated Esperantist. Biography Born in Truro, UK, Tonkin is a dual citizen of the U.K. and the U.S. He earned his undergraduate degree from Cambridge University and his PhD from Harvard University. His academic specialities include the English Renaissance and Edmund Spenser, as well as language use and international languages.
Go to Profile#17058
Etannibi Alemika
#17069
Overall Influence
Etannibi Alemika is a professor of Criminology and the Sociology of Law at the University of Jos. In August 2015, he was one of seven individuals appointed to a newly formed anti-corruption board organized by President Muhammadu Buhari. His most widely cited article is titled Policing and Perceptions of Police in Nigeria, which was published in 1988.
Go to Profile#17059
Christian Guilleminault
#17070
Overall Influence
1938 - 2019 (81 years)
Christian Guilleminault was a French physician and researcher in the field of sleep medicine who played a central role in the early discovery of obstructive sleep apnea and made seminal discoveries in many other areas of sleep medicine.
Go to Profile#17060
Hans W. Liepmann
#17071
Overall Influence
1914 - 2009 (95 years)
Hans Wolfgang Liepmann was an American fluid dynamicist, aerospace scientist and emeritus Theodore von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology. He is known for his numerous contributions in fluid mechanics covering a wide range of problem areas, such as flow instability and turbulence, gas kinetics, viscous compressible fluids and liquid helium flows.
Go to Profile#17061
Robert A. Bruce
#17072
Overall Influence
1916 - 2004 (88 years)
Robert Arthur Bruce was an American cardiologist and a professor at the University of Washington. He was known as the "father of exercise cardiology" for his research and development of the Bruce Protocol.
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Richard Cobb
#17073
Overall Influence
1917 - 1996 (79 years)
Richard Charles Cobb was a British historian and essayist, and professor at the University of Oxford. He was the author of numerous influential works about the history of France, particularly the French Revolution. Cobb meticulously researched the Revolutionary era from a ground-level view sometimes described as "history from below".
Go to Profile#17063
Shūsaku Endō
#17074
Overall Influence
1923 - 1996 (73 years)
was a Japanese author who wrote from the rare perspective of a Japanese Catholic. Internationally, he is known for his 1966 historical fiction novel Silence, which was adapted into a 2016 film of the same name by director Martin Scorsese. He was the laureate of several prestigious literary accolades, including the Akutagawa Prize and the Order of Culture, and was inducted into the Roman Catholic Order of St. Sylvester by Pope Paul VI.
Go to Profile#17064
Alan R. Katritzky
#17075
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Alan Roy Katritzky FRS was a British-born American chemist, latterly working at the University of Florida. He was a heterocyclic chemistry pioneer, who played a leading role in the subject’s elucidation and development.
Go to Profile#17065
Leonardo López Luján
#17076
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Leonardo Náuhmitl López Luján is an archaeologist and one of the leading researchers of pre-Hispanic Central Mexican societies and the history of archaeology in Mexico. He is director of the Templo Mayor Project in Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History since 1991 and son of renowned historian Alfredo López Austin. He is fellow of El Colegio Nacional, the British Academy, the Society of Antiquaries of London, the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris.
Go to Profile#17066
Jonathan Sumption, Lord Sumption
#17077
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Jonathan Philip Chadwick Sumption, Lord Sumption, , KC , is a British author, medieval historian and former senior judge who sat on the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom between 2012 and 2018. Sumption was sworn in as a Justice of the Supreme Court on 11 January 2012, succeeding Lawrence Collins, Baron Collins of Mapesbury. Exceptionally, he was appointed to the Supreme Court directly from the practising bar, without having been a full-time judge. He retired from the Supreme Court on 9 December 2018 upon reaching the mandatory retirement age of 70.
Go to Profile#17067
Hitoshi Nozaki
#17078
Overall Influence
1922 - 2019 (97 years)
Hitoshi Nozaki, sometimes spelled Hitosi, was a Japanese chemist specializing in the field of organic chemistry, known as the head of Japanese organic chemistry research, and one of the discoverers of Nozaki–Hiyama–Kishi reaction. He was Emeritus Professor of Kyoto University.
Go to Profile#17068
Jacques Julliard
#17079
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Jacques Julliard was a French historian, columnist and essayist, and a union leader. He was the author of numerous books. Life Early years Jacques Julliard was born on 4 March 1933 in Brénod, Ain. His father and grandfather had both been mayors of the village where he was born.
Go to Profile#17069
Daniel S. Hamermesh
#17080
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Daniel Selim Hamermesh is a U.S. economist, and Sue Killam Professor in the Foundations of Economics Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor . Previously professor of economics at Royal Holloway, University of London and Michigan State University. He was formerly a Distinguished Scholar at Barnard College.
Go to Profile#17070
David Ferriero
#17081
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
David Sean Ferriero is an American librarian and library administrator, who served as the 10th Archivist of the United States. He previously served as the Director of the New York Public Library and as the University Librarian and Vice Provost for Library Affairs at Duke University. Prior to his Duke position, he worked for 31 years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology library. Ferriero was the first librarian to serve as Archivist of the United States.
Go to Profile#17071
David Moher
#17082
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
David Moher is an Irish epidemiologist and senior scientist in the Clinical Epidemiology Program at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute , where he is also Director of the for Journalology, and the Canadian EQUATOR Centre. He is also an associate professor and University Research Chair at the University of Ottawa. An expert on systematic reviews in medical science, he played a major role in the development of both the PRISMA and CONSORT statements. He is a co-editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal Systematic Reviews. He has been recognised as an ISI Highly Cited Researcher, and recei...
Go to Profile#17072
Michael Bublé
#17083
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Michael Steven Bublé is a Canadian singer and songwriter. Born in Burnaby, British Columbia, he is often credited for helping to renew public interest and appreciation for traditional pop standards and the Great American Songbook.
Go to Profile#17073
Bent Larsen
#17084
Overall Influence
1935 - 2010 (75 years)
Jørgen Bent Larsen was a Danish chess grandmaster and author. Known for his imaginative and unorthodox style of play, he was the second strongest non-Soviet player, behind Bobby Fischer, for much of the 1960s and 1970s. He is considered to be the strongest player born in Denmark and the strongest from Scandinavia until the emergence of Magnus Carlsen.
Go to Profile#17074
Olivier Ameisen
#17085
Overall Influence
1953 - 2013 (60 years)
Olivier Ameisen was a French-American cardiologist who wrote a best-selling book about curing alcoholism using the drug baclofen. Education and career Ameisen began his medical studies in 1969 at age 16 at Université René Descartes Faculté de Médecine Cochin Port-Royal.
Go to Profile#17075
Tracy K. Smith
#17086
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Tracy K. Smith is an American poet and educator. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She has published five collections of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 volume Life on Mars. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was published in 2015.
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Lawrence Rosen
#17087
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Lawrence Rosen is an American attorney and computer specialist. He is a founding partner of Rosenlaw & Einschlag, a Californian technology law firm, specializing in intellectual property protection, licensing and business transactions for technology companies. He also served as general counsel and secretary of the Open Source Initiative, and participates in open source foundations and projects, such as the Python Software Foundation, and the Free Standards Group.
Go to Profile#17077
Steve Lukather
#17088
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Steven Lee Lukather is an American guitarist, singer, songwriter, arranger and record producer, best known as the sole continuous founding member of the rock band Toto. His reputation as a skilled guitarist led to a steady flow of session work beginning in the 1970s that has since established him as a prolific session musician, recording guitar tracks for more than 1,500 albums spanning a broad array of artists and genres. He has also contributed to albums and hit singles as a songwriter, arranger and producer. Notably, Lukather played guitar on Boz Scaggs' albums Down Two Then Left and Midd...
Go to Profile#17078
Osvaldo Ardiles
#17089
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Osvaldo César Ardiles , often referred to in Britain as Ossie Ardiles, is an Argentine football manager, pundit and former midfielder who won the 1978 FIFA World Cup as part of the Argentina national team.
Go to Profile#17079
Anita L. Allen
#17090
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
#17080
Keith O'Nions
#17091
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Sir Robert Keith O'Nions FRS HonFREng , is a British scientist and ex-President & Rector of Imperial College London. He is the former Director General of the Research Councils UK as well as Professor of the Physics and Chemistry of Minerals and Head of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#17081
Jean Kerr
#17092
Overall Influence
1922 - 2003 (81 years)
Jean Kerr was an American author and playwright born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, who authored the 1957 bestseller Please Don't Eat the Daisies and the plays King of Hearts in 1954 and Mary, Mary in 1961.
Go to Profile#17082
Joe Royle
#17093
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Joseph Royle is an English football manager and former footballer. In his playing career as a striker, he debuted for Everton at the age of 16 and went on to play for Manchester City, Bristol City, Norwich City, and the England national team. Later, he managed Oldham Athletic, Everton, Manchester City, and Ipswich Town. He is currently a director at Oldham Athletic.
Go to Profile#17083
Amelia Valcárcel
#17094
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Amelia Valcárcel is a Spanish philosopher and feminist. She is considered within the “philosophic feminism” as part of the “equality feminism” approach. In 2015 she is a professor in Moral and Political Philosophy at the National University of Distance Education and since 2006 is member of the Spanish Council of State.
Go to Profile#17084
Jimly Asshiddiqie
#17095
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Jimly Asshiddiqie is an Indonesian academic who served as the first chief justice of Indonesia's Constitutional Court from 2003 to 2008. Education and academic career Jimly graduated from high school in Palembang in 1973. He obtained his law degree from the University of Indonesia in 1982. In 1986, he obtained his master's in law from UI. In 1990, he obtained his doctorate in law from UI and the Van Vollenhoven Institute, as well as Leiden University Law Faculty. In 1998, Jimly became Professor of Constitutional Law at the UI Faculty of Law.
Go to Profile#17085
D. H. Lehmer
#17096
Overall Influence
1905 - 1991 (86 years)
Derrick Henry "Dick" Lehmer , almost always cited as D.H. Lehmer, was an American mathematician significant to the development of computational number theory. Lehmer refined Édouard Lucas' work in the 1930s and devised the Lucas–Lehmer test for Mersenne primes. His peripatetic career as a number theorist, with him and his wife taking numerous types of work in the United States and abroad to support themselves during the Great Depression, fortuitously brought him into the center of research into early electronic computing.
Go to Profile#17086
Chee Soon Juan
#17097
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Chee Soon Juan is a Singaporean politician, activist and former lecturer who has been appointed as Secretary-General of the Singapore Democratic Party since 1993. Prior to entering politics in 1992, upon Chiam See Tong's invitation to join the Singapore Democratic Party , Chee was a lecturer at the National University of Singapore. Chee subsequently succeeded Chiam as the party's secretary-general after Chiam, whom Chee and the rest of the party's leadership have had a number of disagreements, left the party. The party had three Members of Parliament at the time Chee took over as secretary-g...
Go to Profile#17087
Stephen Walsh
#17098
Overall Influence
Stephen Walsh is a British journalist, broadcaster, musicologist, and classical music biographer. He is the author of biographies of Stravinsky, Mussorgsky, and Debussy, as well as books on Schumann, Bartók, and the music of Stravinsky. As of 2021, he is an emeritus professor of Cardiff University.
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Michel Danino
#17099
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Michel Danino is a French-born Indian writer. He is a guest professor at IIT Gandhinagar and has been a member of the Indian Council of Historical Research. In 2017, Government of India conferred Padma Shri, the fourth-highest civilian honor for his contribution towards Literature & Education.
Go to Profile#17089
Claudia Durst Johnson
#17100
Overall Influence
Claudia Durst Johnson is a literary scholar best known for her work on the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, introducing the idea of the novel's gothicism and gothic satire. In the process of her research she befriended the author, Harper Lee. When the city of Chicago organized a One City One Book program in 2001 based on To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee was unavailable to speak, so Johnson was invited to Chicago to present the book to the city.
Go to Profile#17090
Usha Sanyal
#17101
Overall Influence
Usha Sanyal is an American scholar and historian. Her PhD dissertation analysed the Islamic legal scholar Ahmed Raza Khan Barelvi. She is Visiting assistant professor of history at Wingate University in North Carolina.
Go to Profile#17091
Carl Perkins
#17102
Overall Influence
1932 - 1998 (66 years)
Carl Lee Perkins was an American guitarist, singer and songwriter. A rockabilly great and pioneer of rock and roll, he began his recording career at the Sun Studio, in Memphis, beginning in 1954. Among his best-known songs are "Blue Suede Shoes", "Honey Don't", "Matchbox" and "Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby".
Go to Profile#17092
Sterling Nesbitt
#17103
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Sterling Nesbitt is an American paleontologist best known for his work on the origin and early evolutionary patterns of archosaurs. He is currently an associate professor at Virginia Tech in the Department of Geosciences.
Go to Profile#17093
Mikhail Postnikov
#17104
Overall Influence
1927 - 2004 (77 years)
Mikhail Mikhailovich Postnikov was a Soviet mathematician, known for his work in algebraic and differential topology. Biography He was born in Shatura, near Moscow. He received his Ph.D. from Moscow State University under the direction of Lev Pontryagin, and then became a professor at this university. He died in Moscow.
Go to Profile#17094
Bernd Bruegge
#17105
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Bernd Bruegge is a German computer scientist, full professor at the Technische Universität München and the head of the Chair for Applied Software Engineering. He is also an adjunct associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Go to Profile#17095
Herfried Münkler
#17106
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Herfried Münkler is a German political scientist. He is a Professor of Political Theory at Humboldt University in Berlin. Münkler is a regular commentator on global affairs in the German-language media and author of numerous books on the history of political ideas , on state-building and on the theory of war, such as "Machiavelli" , "Gewalt und Ordnung" , "The New Wars" and "Empires: The Logic of World Domination from Ancient Rome to the United States" . In 2009 Münkler was awarded the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in the category "Non-fiction" for Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen .
Go to Profile#17096
Peter E. Caines
#17107
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Peter Edwin Caines, FRSC is a control theorist and James McGill Professor and Macdonald Chair in Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, which he joined in 1980.
Go to Profile#17097
Zia Mian
#17108
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Zia Mian is a Pakistani-American physicist, nuclear expert, nuclear policy maker and research scientist at Princeton University. Currently, he is the director of the Project on Peace and Security in South Asia, at the Program on Science and Global Security. He is the editor of several books, his books heavily focus on the issues concerning nuclear science, nuclear technology, and Science and technology in Pakistan. Zia Mian has played a pivotal role in Pakistan's peaceful use of nuclear technology and helped make two documentary films on peace and security in South Asia. Mian has been listed as one of the 15 Asian Scientists To Watch by Asian Scientist Magazine on 15 May 2011.
Go to Profile#17098
Daniel Kane
#17109
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Daniel Mertz Kane is an American mathematician. He is an associate professor with a joint position in the Mathematics Department and the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of California, San Diego.
Go to Profile#17099
Naoto Fukasawa
#17110
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Naoto Fukasawa is a Japanese designer, author, and educator, working in the fields of product and furniture design. He is known for his product design work with the Japanese retail company Muji, as well as collaborations with companies such as Herman Miller, Alessi, B&B Italia, Emeco, Magis, and HAY.
Go to Profile#17100
Paula Fredriksen
#17111
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Paula Fredriksen is an American historian and scholar of early Christianity. She held the position of William Goodwin Aurelio Professor of Scripture at Boston University from 1990 to 2010. Now emerita, she has been distinguished visiting professor in the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, since 2009.
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